Epitaphs for Underdogs

Epitaphs for Underdogs

Author: Andrew Szepessy

Publisher: Random House

Published: 2021-04-15

Total Pages: 288

ISBN-13: 1473567661

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'A wonderful discovery' (Ian McEwan), this is a beguiling dystopian tale of a young man confronted with the truth about freedom. On a hot summer night, a young man sits in a dark cell in a Hungarian prison. The guards do not explain why he is here; he does not know if he will ever be released. But he is far from alone. Others, too, are trapped within the stone walls - singers and students, sages and spies. As the days pass, the man is drawn into their conversations and their lives, and soon becomes a witness to their sometimes outlandish acts of rebellion. Written in the early 1980s and inspired by Andrew Szepessy's own experiences, Epitaphs for Underdogs is a beguiling and exhilarating novel about power, justice and freedom, and about the solidarity that can be found in even the most unexpected places. 'Beautiful... With its sense of the absurd, its laughter in the dark, it belongs in the great tradition of dystopian literature, with echoes of early Kundera and Nabokov' IAN McEWAN


Epitaphs for Underdogs

Epitaphs for Underdogs

Author: Andrew Szepessy

Publisher: National Geographic Books

Published: 2021-05-25

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 1529111234

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'A wonderful discovery' (Ian McEwan), this is a beguiling dystopian tale of a young man confronted with the truth about freedom. On a hot summer night, a young man sits in a dark cell in a Hungarian prison. The guards do not explain why he is here; he does not know if he will ever be released. But he is far from alone. Others, too, are trapped within the stone walls - singers and students, sages and spies. As the days pass, the man is drawn into their conversations and their lives, and soon becomes a witness to their sometimes outlandish acts of rebellion. Written in the early 1980s and inspired by Andrew Szepessy's own experiences, Epitaphs for Underdogs is a beguiling and exhilarating novel about power, justice and freedom, and about the solidarity that can be found in even the most unexpected places. 'Beautiful... With its sense of the absurd, its laughter in the dark, it belongs in the great tradition of dystopian literature, with echoes of early Kundera and Nabokov' IAN McEWAN


Bucky Harris

Bucky Harris

Author: Jack Smiles

Publisher: McFarland

Published: 2011-07-25

Total Pages: 322

ISBN-13: 0786486422

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In 1924, at the age of 27, manager and second baseman Stanley "Bucky" Harris--aka "The Boy Wonder"--led the Washington Senators to their only World Series championship. His incredible debut season at the helm of the Senators marked the beginning of remarkable 29-year managerial career that earned him a spot in the Baseball Hall of Fame. This detailed biography chronicles Harris's road to the top of his sport, including his youth in the coal mining region of eastern Pennsylvania, his brief stint in professional basketball, his early days as a baseball player, his 1947 world championship as manager of the Yankees, and his role in the racial integration of both the Senators and the Boston Red Sox. By highlighting Harris' easy-going nature and intelligence, this profile makes it perfectly clear why one player being traded to Harris' Senators declared, "Ask any ballplayer who he'd like to play for and he'd say Bucky Harris."


“Comfort Stations” as Remembered by Okinawans during World War II

“Comfort Stations” as Remembered by Okinawans during World War II

Author: Yunshin Hong

Publisher: BRILL

Published: 2020-03-02

Total Pages: 576

ISBN-13: 9004419519

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Okinawa, the only Japanese prefecture invaded by US forces in 1945, was forced to accommodate 146 “military comfort stations” from 1941–45. How did Okinawans view these intrusive spaces and their impact on regional society? Interviews, survivor testimonies, and archival documents show that the Japanese army manipulated comfort stations to isolate local communities, facilitate “spy hunts,” and foster a fear of rape by Americans that induced many Okinawans to choose death over survival. The politics of sex pursued by the US occupation (1945–72) perpetuated that fear of rape into the postwar era. This study of war, sexual violence, and postcolonial memory sees the comfort stations as discursive spaces of remembrance where differing war experiences can be articulated, exchanged, and mutually reassessed. Winner of the 2017 Best Publication Award of the Year by the Okinawa Times.


Neo-Victorian Humour

Neo-Victorian Humour

Author:

Publisher: BRILL

Published: 2017-06-06

Total Pages: 362

ISBN-13: 9004336613

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This volume highlights humour’s crucial role in shaping historical re-visions of the long nineteenth century, through modes ranging from subtle irony, camp excess, ribald farce, and aesthetic parody to blackly comic narrative games. It analyses neo-Victorian humour’s politicisation, its ideological functions and ethical implications across varied media, including fiction, drama, film, webcomics, and fashion. Contemporary humour maps the assumed distance between postmodernity and its targeted nineteenth-century referents only to repeatedly collapse the same in a seemingly self-defeating nihilistic project. This collection explores how neo-Victorian humour generates empathy and effective socio-political critique, dispensing symbolic justice, but also risks recycling the past’s invidious ideologies under the politically correct guise of comic debunking, even to the point of negating laughter itself. "This rich and innovative collection invites us to reflect on the complex and various deployments of humour in neo-Victorian texts, where its consumers may wish at times that they could swallow back the laughter a scene or event provokes. It covers a range of approaches to humour utilised by neo-Victorian writers, dramatists, graphic novelists and filmmakers – including the deliberately and pompously unfunny, the traumatic, the absurd, the ribald, and the frankly distasteful – producing a richly satisfying anthology of innovative readings of ‘canonical’ neo-Victorian texts as well as those which are potential generic outliers. The collection explores what is funny in the neo-Victorian and who we are laughing at – the Victorians, as we like to imagine them, or ourselves, in ways we rarely acknowledge? This is a celebration of the parodic playfulness of a wide range of texts, from fiction to fashion, whilst offering a trenchant critique of the politics of postmodern laughter that will appeal to those working in adaptation studies, gender and queer studies, as well as literary and cultural studies more generally." - Prof. Imelda Whelehan, University of Tasmania, Australia


Artifacts, Representations and Social Practice

Artifacts, Representations and Social Practice

Author: C. Gould

Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media

Published: 2012-12-06

Total Pages: 573

ISBN-13: 9401109028

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The essays collected here in honor of Marx Wartofsky's sixty-fifth birthday are a celebration of his rich contribution to philosophy over the past four decades and a testimony to the wide influence he has had on thinkers with quite various approaches of their own. His diverse philosophical interests and main themes have ranged from constructivism and realism in the philosophy of science to practices of representation and the creation of artifacts in aesthetics; and from the development of human cognition and the historicity of modes of knowing to the construction of norms in the context of concrete social critique. Or again, in the history of philosophy, his work spans historical approaches to Hegel, Feuerbach, and Marx, as well as contemporary implications of their work; and in applied philosophy, problems of education, medicine, and new technologies. Marx's philosophical theorizing moves from the highest levels of abstraction to the most concrete concern with the everyday and with contemporary social and political reality. And perhaps most notably, it is acutely sensitive to the importance of historical development and social practice. As a student of John Herman Randall, Jr. and Ernest Nagel at Columbia, Marx developed an exemplary background in both the history of philosophy and systematic philosophy and subsequently combined this with a wide acquaintance with analytic philosophy. He is at once aware of the requirements of system and of the need for rigorous and careful detailed argument.


Spoon River America

Spoon River America

Author: Jason Stacy

Publisher: University of Illinois Press

Published: 2021-05-11

Total Pages: 333

ISBN-13: 0252052730

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From Main Street to Stranger Things, how poetry changed our idea of small town life A literary and cultural milestone, Spoon River Anthology captured an idea of the rural Midwest that became a bedrock myth of life in small-town America. Jason Stacy places the book within the atmosphere of its time and follows its progress as the poetry took root and thrived. Published by Edgar Lee Masters in 1915, Spoon River Anthology won praise from modernists while becoming an ongoing touchstone for American popular culture. Stacy charts the ways readers embraced, debated, and reshaped Masters's work in literary controversies and culture war skirmishes; in films and other media that over time saw the small town as idyllic then conflicted then surreal; and as the source of three archetypes—populist, elite, and exile—that endure across the landscape of American culture in the twenty-first century. A wide-ranging reconsideration of a literary landmark, Spoon River America tells the story of how a Midwesterner's poetry helped change a nation's conception of itself.


Kin

Kin

Author: Miljenko Jergovic

Publisher: Archipelago

Published: 2021-06-15

Total Pages: 929

ISBN-13: 1939810523

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Kin is a dazzling family epic from one of Croatia's most prized writers. In this sprawling narrative which spans the entire twentieth century, Miljenko Jergović peers into the dusty corners of his family's past, illuminating them with a tender, poetic precision. Ordinary, forgotten objects - a grandfather's beekeeping journals, a rusty benzene lighter, an army issued raincoat - become the lenses through which Jergović investigates the joys and sorrows of a family living through a century of war. The work is ultimately an ode to Yugoslavia - Jergović sees his country through the devastation of the First World War, the Second, the Cold, then the Bosnian war of the 90s; through its changing street names and borders, shifting seasons, through its social rituals at graveyards, operas, weddings, markets - rendering it all in loving, vivid detail. A portrait of an era.